Announcements: Including Naomi Replansky's
award for her Collected Poems!

I haven't done a Books for Readers Newsletter
in more than a month. I've been travelling-- as far as Lincoln
Memorial University in Tennessee where I taught a master class in
fiction and enjoyed the Appalachian mountains around that part of the
world where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee converge. My dad was born
in that region, and I used to spend summers with my grandmother in Wise
County Virginia, and visit my aunt in Scott County Tennessee. I'm
always struck by the love of story in Appalachia, whether read, spoken
or sung. This enriches Appalachian writers' conferences, where you also
find deep and abiding respect for literature and the belief in finding
meaning from the path of the story. I had a lovely week-end, and
recommend that everyone go to Mountain Heritage Literary Festival .
In the interstices between traveling and teaching
and writing, I've been reading. I have some books you may not have
heard of, and some that are doing quite well for themselves, thank you
very much! Among the latter is Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which was the main source for the recent block buster movie, Lincoln. The book was on its own merits a best seller for a few weeks in 2005.
I especially enjoyed
the story of Lincoln's road to the nomination for president. Kearns
Goodwin emphasizes his political talent and his ability to bring the
best out of men with very large egos, and she also, like so many before
her, falls under the spell of Lincoln's personality and integrity. I
heard people praising him my whole life, except for when they were
complaining that he wasn't anti-slavery soon enough. In this book, I
finally got it: his charm, and his enormous abilities and also
the terrible trade offs required for dealing in a multi-party system
with people whose values are corrupt.
It was a nasty, nasty war: the sheer number of
deaths in battle was extraordinary. One of the excellent elements in
this book is the personalization of the struggle through he use of
letters and journals voices of many people, especially women like
Frances (Mrs. William) Seward and Mary Lincoln and young men like
Lincoln's secretaries (and future biographers) Hays and Nicolay. They
tell Lincoln stories, of course, but also what it was like to have
family members dying in war or coming home terribly mangled.
Other striking things: How short the war was in
years; how intractable was the hatred of black people and injustice to
them, not only in the south. The horrors of Mississippi in summer 1964
was, after all, only three generations after the war. The terrorism
during the Civil Rights movement was in many ways a continuation of the
war.
Finally, it was a book about about writing: a lot
of time is spent on how Lincoln's speeches were revised, and how he-- a
sharp logician and rhetorician--turned so often to storytelling to reach
an understanding himself and to communicate to others.

More nonfiction:
I also read the enormous doorstopper of a biography of Joseph Kennedy,
THE PATRIARCH: THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TURBULENT TIMES OF JOSEPH P.
KENNEDY by David Nasaw. I was at Bucknell University for a while when
he was there, so I have some interest in Nasaw's career.
It took me a long time to decide I wanted to read
this 800 pager about a man and family I never quite understood what was
so terrific about: that is to say, I never got the romanticizing of the
Kennedies, and reading about the patriarch of the family didn't make me
like them or respect their politics much-- but I did get fascinated.
Even after I'd dipped into the book,
I kept laying it aside. Usually, I am drawn into biographies by the
childhood stories, but for some reason, I don't know if it was Nasaw or
Kennedy, this one didn't really get going till Kennedy started acting in
government. You'd think his years in Hollywood and his affair with
Gloria Swanson would be fun, but through the first couple of hundred
pages I just didn't care enough about Kennedy. What kept me reading was
wanting to out about the lobotomy of the oldest Kennedy daughter, who
appeared to be slow but not all that damaged until they opened up her
head.
When Kennedy became ambassador to England and his
kids got older, I began to get really interested. His opposition to the
war– for conservative reasons– gave me a look at the Roosevelt
administration I'd never had. I always vaguely thought everything was
rah-rah go FDR-- well, maybe not the New Deal, but surely the Second
World War was popular, yes?
Kennedy thought the Second World War had the
potential to destroy capitalism,and thus should be opposed! Still, he
played as best he could the part of a good soldier, representing the
Roosevelt administration, at least most of the time.
Then the Kennedy boys went to war, and the familiar
family catastrophes began: within ten years he lost his oldest son,
lost his oldest daughter to lobotomy and his next daughter to an
airplane crash. This was all long before the famous assassinations. The
decimation of a family brings up feelings, no matter how much you don't
like most of what Kennedy stood for.
The political parts are excellent: in the second
half, Kennedy's efforts to support his sons' political careers offers a
real lesson in how those things are done in the real world, with lots of
money and the calling in of favors and building relationships.

Another of the books that doesn't need my praise is William Styron's Sophie's Choice, which
I re-read (again?). I admire this book a lot and this time I was
particularly impressed by the novel's elegant shape, although the
narrator maybe makes it a little too explicit: how it begins with the
noisy lovemaking bed and ends with death in the bed.
My favorites are all the parts that Sophie narrates;
charmer-schizo Nathan is a superb character; Styron creates some
good Nazi characters; and I adore the post-war New York City setting.
It is a good book, probably (IMHO) Styron's best. I even like, up to a
point, Stingo as a narrator and the writer-as-a- young artist theme,
but this is also where I see the novel's flaws. There is just too much
of Stingo's sex life (or lack of it). Some of it is funny, some of it
is painful, but I get it much sooner than Styron gives up on writing
about it! A nice boy in the late nineteen forties has a hard row to hoe
with the nice girls determined to be modern but virginal. Fine, let's
get on with Sophie and Nathan.
Finally, the whole theme of the young writer wanting
to be "great" is painful to read, maybe too close to home for me, but
his suffering reminds me that the Age of the Great-Man American
Novelist seems to have petered out in depression and alcohol and
buffoonery (in the case of Norman Mailer). Happily, we've still got
great novels being written, without all the posturing.

Short Notes

Etel
Adnan's small novel SITT MARIE ROSE is an amazing hundred pages set
during the (last) Lebanese Civil War. An ethnically Christian woman
lives with Palestinians, loves a Palestinian man, and works for their
cause. An old boyfriend in the Christian militia is part of a small
group who captures, interrogates, and murders her in the school where
she woks with deaf children. The brief story is told in many voices:
the children speak as a group, the militia men have their turn. There
is hunting imagery, there is Sitt Marie Rose's feminist sensibility.
The only real Christian, she says, is one who stands up for the
Stranger. It is a poet's novel, searing and beautiful. Worth seeking
out-- I found it as a used book on the Internet.

I admired and enjoyed reading Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, except for the ending. Patchett is an very inventive and moving writer, and I'm a big fan of her Bel Canto. This one is good too: it is just what
is says, the story of a woman who has made her life as the assistant to
a charismatic magician. She is in love with him, even marries him, and
he is loving towards her, but sexually attracted to men. He dies, and
she discovers the secrets of his birth family.
It's all about Los Angeles and Nebraska, with
well-drawn mid western characters who are firmly of their place but not
condescended to. I was, however, disappointed by the ending which has
what I think of as a short story ending: that is, it is clever and
surprising with a dollop of "real" magic. I think this kind of thing
works best in something short. It seemed too slight for the solid weight
of realism that preceded it. I felt like Patchett was dodging a lot of
human character-driven questions she had raised and hinted at.
Well, I always say I read novels for the journey, not for the final five pages.

My first Ron Rash novel was a short work called The Cove, with
clean strong writing and a good story. Something in it seemed,
however, manipulative to me. It wasn't the sentences-- he's clearly a
superb craftsman-- but it was as if he planned his plot and stuck to it,
whether or not it worked. The story sets up a mystery in the first
pages: whose skull is in the old well?
Then we go back in time to a family living in a hollow that doesn't
really get enough sun for farming, where the parents are dead, the
daughter shunned as a witch, the son back from the war short a hand. A
stranger arrives, and we're off to the races: a lot of energy and a lot
of momentum, but the deaths at the end seem to me to fit a plan rather
than rise from the story.
There is an interesting author's note in the e-book
version I read saying that Rash revised the book, de-emphasized one of
the point-of-view characters, a one-dimensional bigoted sleazebag.

I also want to make a short mention of Chinua Achebe's Hopes and Impediments:Selected Essays by Chinua Achebe.
I intend to re-read many of the essays here, especially the ones on the
uses of fiction and of course the seminal "An Image of Africa: Racism
in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." For now, I just want to quote from "The Truth of Fiction:"
"How often do we hear people say, 'Oh, I don't have
the time to read novels,' implying that fiction is frivolous? They
would generally add– lest you consider them illiterate– that they read
histories or biographies, which they presume to be more appropriate to
serious-minded adults. Such people are to be pitied; they are like a
six-cylinder car which says: Oh, I can manage all right on three
sparking-plugs, thank you very much. Well, it can manage somehow but it
will sound like an asthmatic motorcycle! The life of the imagination
is a vital element of our total nature. If we starve it or pollute it
the quality of our life is depressed or soiled.
"For just as man is a tool-making animal and has
recreated his natural world with his tools, so is he a fiction-making
animal and refashions his imaginative landscape with his fictions."

FIRST NOVEL FROM LAURA TREACY BENTLEY

Laura Treacy Bentley's first novel THE SILVER TATTOO moves from West Virginia to Ireland where protagonist Leah Howland must face not only the
terrible thing that happened to her husband, but also her own guilt and
fears– and a very real and very mysterious threat to her life.
This dark literary thriller is an interesting
mixture of the dark fears that pursue us when we are isolated in strange
places and real life horrors that require courage and determination to
face. Bentley easily combines these these with suspense and literary
and folk references in a powerful combination of psychological thriller
and paen to Ireland.
Bentley is a poet whose work has been praised by Ray Bradbury. For more commentary on The Silver Tattoo, see the review in the Herald-Dispatch .

RESPONSES TO LAST ISSUE

Naomi Replansky says, "Thank you, as always, for the
newsletter. And for sending me now to Willkie Collins. I've been
re-reading George Gissing with great admiration, in particular for his
NEW GRUB STREET."

THE E-READER REPORT WITH JOHN BIRCH: THE BOOKSCOUT WILL TELL YOU WHAT TO READ NEXT

Publishers Random House have launched a mobile
Facebook app called BookScout, which it describes as an "e-book
discovering engine." It goes to great lengths to learn about your
reading likes and dislikes, and then recommends books you'll probably
enjoy but probably wouldn't have discovered on your own. Book Scout
recommends Random House's books, of course, but also pretty much every
book in the listings of major distributors, such as Ingram. The app will
offer you a list of retailers that have your book of choice, and with a
few more mouse clicks you'll have bought.
To see how it works, just type "BookScout" into Facebook.

About John Birch: The great Canadian humorist
Stephen Leacock once wrote a piece called "Men Who Have Shaved Me," and
John's decided to do his version of it. Read "Clip Joints" in his blog: www.JohnBirchLive.blogspot.com -- a growing collection of nearly 30 of his short stories, articles and essays.

June 29, 2013: The Literary Image and Impact of
Breece D'J Pancake: Native Son Symposium. 1140 Smith Street, Milton, WV
304-743-6711 Speakers: Dr. Grace Toney Edwards 10:00 a.m. An Overview
of Pancake's Life and Career Dr. Rob McDonald 11:00 a.m. Native Ground,
the Role of Place In Shaping Literary Imagination Marie Manilla 1:30
p.m. An Analysis of Pancake's Writing Panel of Peers 2:30 p.m. Breece As
We Knew Him Phyllis Wilson Moore 3:30 p.m. The Impact of Pancake's
Work

ABOUT AMAZON.COM

The largest unionized bookstore in America has a webstore at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.

For a discussion of Amazon and organized labor and small presses, see the comments of Jonathan Greene and others in Issues #97 and #98 .

WHERE TO FIND BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS NEWSLETTER

If a book discussed in this newsletter has no
source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from
your public library as either a hard copy or a digital copy. You may
also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To buy books
online, I often go first to Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder tells you the book price WITH shipping and handling, so you can compare what you’re really going to have to pay.

A lot of people whose political instincts I
respect prefer the unionized bricks-and-mortar bookstore Powells (see
"About Amazon.com" above) that sells online at http://powellsbooks.com.

Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores. Also consider Paperback Book Swap, a low cost (postage only) way to get rid of your old books and get new ones by trading with other readers.

If you are using an electronic reader like Kindle, Nook, or Kobo, don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics, but other things as well. And libraries now lend e-books too!

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RESPONSES TO THIS NEWSLETTER

Please send responses to this newsletter and suggestions directly to Meredith Sue Willis . Unless you instruct otherwise, your responses may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.